Bright spirits
Laval, QC, November 2010
About this photo: This is one of my favorite photos of the year. Head here to share yours as part of Thematic Photographic's year-end extravaganza.I wrote about this blue bottle of booze the other day. This is my other favorite bottle from that collection. It's too pretty to open up, too pretty to drink, too pretty do do much more than stick it in a sunlit spot and drink in the reflected light.
Does it make sense that I keep shooting hooch in bright sunshine? Probably not. But as I wiped the dust and fingerprints off the bottle and prepared it for its mini photo session on my mother's dining room table, I wasn't overly concerned about whether it made sense or not. Like the now-famous-to-me blue bottle, this one was also a silent basemen
t sentinel while I was growing up. It sat on a shelf, nearly forgotten, ever since I could remember.Indeed, that was the neat thing about all of my father's bottles: I don't remember him bringing any of them home. From my perspective, they were always there, fixtures that simply never changed. Which was a good thing for a kid like me who had always craved stability. Knowing that something had always been and would always be was something I held onto. In my naive, child's mind, stores didn't go bankrupt, couples didn't divorce, boo-boos always healed and nobody died.
We all know how the world really works, of course. Indeed, I was here in the first place on this brilliantly sunny afternoon because everything had changed. And those childhood assumptions no longer applied. But watching the brightly reflected color on the table, I felt that at least one touchstone from long ago was still very much the same. Only better, because it was no longer dusty, no longer sitting on a basement shelf.
Your turn: Do you have a memory of childhood that brings you comfort today?
